Low transmission rates can force real time video packets to be either dropped or delayed. Variation in transmission rates also create delay jitter among video packets. These issues make it difficult to deliver real time video through upstream low bandwidth links.
One solution is to provide a lower rate video source. However, this degrades the video quality even when bandwidth increases on low bandwidth upstream links. For mixed high and low bandwidth links in the network, the higher bandwidth paths to the video source could then not fully utilize available bandwidth to view higher quality videos due to the other lower bandwidth paths.
Previous work related to processing packets in an Internet environment for Quality of Service (QoS) largely involved assigning priorities to different types of traffic flows and corresponding queue management techniques. However, these techniques do not address the problems related to low rate video links.